On November 26, two National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC were shot at close range. Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old woman, died, and Andrew Wolfe, a 24-year-old man, is still in the hospital with extremely serious injuries. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan man who fought on the U.S. side in the Afghanistan war has been charged with first degree murder and three other felonies. He has pleaded not guilty.¹ Lakanwal was shot on the scene and is still in the hospital. 

The shooting of the two National Guard members was a heinous act. And as Refuse Fascism said in a statement, “Incidents such as this have nothing to do with and only do harm to the nonviolent mass struggle of millions that is needed to drive the fascist Trump regime from power.” But Trump and the other MAGA vultures were quick to jump on this tragic situation to further whip up Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, and to impose even more restrictions on immigration from the “Third World.” 

Although even the police say that they don’t know what motivated the shooting, Trump declared it was “terrorism.” Kristi Noem (head of the Department of Homeland Security) claimed (without evidence) that Lakanwal had been “radicalized” by people in the Afghan community in Washington state. She said that that whole community needed to be “investigated.” Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville tweeted “We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack.” Trump called for a “reexamination” of all Afghans who had previously been granted asylum or other legal status. 

Trump also called for the expulsion of all Somali immigrants, calling them “garbage,” and saying they should “go back to where they came from” and that “their country is no good for a reason.” And he ordered major ICE operations targeting Somalis in the Minnesota-St. Paul area, where more than 80,000 people of Somali origin live.

In that same cold-blooded xenophobic (immigrant-hating) spirit Trump’s chief advisor, Stephen Miller, posted this (responding to criticism of Trump for blaming whole countries for the [alleged] act of one person):

This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.

How America “Broke” Afghanistan

As one Pakistani novelist said on hearing this, “Who broke the homeland!!?” 

This is exactly the right question! The answer to that starts with the fact that Afghanistan is “cursed” by its strategic location bridging Central and East Asia to the Middle East. So imperialist powers have repeatedly fought to control it. Britain invaded three times in the 19th century. In 1979, the former Soviet Union (now Russia) invaded to prop up a friendly government. In response, the U.S. helped organize, arm and fund Islamic fundamentalist armies to overthrow the pro-Soviet government. At least one-half million Afghan civilians were killed, and Afghanistan’s Islamic theocratic fascist forces were given a tremendous boost. This was part of U.S. imperialism’s drive to control the entire region of Central Asia and the Middle East. Yes, all these countries had all the problems of oppressive class societies to begin with—but by the second half of the 20th century, U.S. imperialism was the power that mainly set the terms for who did and didn’t rule, and what did and didn’t happen in these countries.

In reaction to this and other developments, nationalist political movements rooted in Islam arose in this region. Bob Avakian summed this up in 2007 in a way that explains much about the international dynamics of the past 30 years:

What we see in contention here with Jihad [Islamic fundamentalism] on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade [increasingly globalized western imperialism] on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.

While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these “historically outmodeds” has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system, and in particular the U.S. imperialists.

The U.S. War Against the Taliban

One grouping of those theocrats, the Taliban, came to power in 1996 after a period of civil war. They imposed extreme oppression of women as well as minority religions and others. In 2001, Osama bin Laden operated out of a base in Afghanistan to engineer the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. The Taliban offered to negotiate bin Laden’s turnover to the U.S., but the U.S. instead seized the opportunity to invade and occupy Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, and cobbled together a corrupt and widely despised puppet government in its place. War erupted between the U.S. and its lackey government and the Taliban, leading to an estimated 241,000 civilian deaths by violence, and hundreds of thousands more from war-caused hunger and disease.

Forty years of war, generations being born, living and dying surrounded by death, destruction, brutal oppressors and foreign armies. Agriculture devastated, and the economy increasingly dependent on war spending and other funds, almost all of which either came from or were controlled by U.S. imperialism.

What It Really Means to Work for American Occupiers

During the U.S. occupation many thousands of people worked for the U.S., the pro-U.S. government, or NGOs or businesses tied to the U.S. Many took these jobs either to ward off hunger, or in the misguided belief that the U.S. was actually there to help liberate them from the oppressive Taliban. But doing this also put them at odds with many in their families or neighbors who opposed the U.S. occupation even as they also hated the Taliban. And it put them at risk of being killed by the Taliban.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal was one of them, reportedly recruited into the CIA-led Unit 03 of the Kandahar Strike Force in 1992, when he was just 16 years old. These Strike Forces (also known as “Zero Units”) were in fact death squads, committing war crimes against the Afghan people. In 2019, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on 14 documented incidents in which these units carried out night raids, bursting into homes as people slept, and slaughtering civilians, including small children and elderly people, and other crimes.²

When the U.S. was recruiting Afghans to work with them, they always promised “we’ll protect you, we’ll have your back.” But then when the U.S. pulled out, it made no serious provision for the safety of tens of thousands of people who had worked with them, whether as teachers, soldiers or political leaders. There was a desperate scramble for people to get out as the Taliban retook the country. Some thousands did escape, and then (like Lakanwal) were put through intensive vetting to prove, again and again, that they were “loyal” enough to enter the U.S., while the U.S. government sought to wash its hands of them as quickly as possible.³

We don’t know a lot about Lakanwal, but one thing that has been reported by friends, family and social workers is that he appeared to be going through a mental breakdown, spending weeks in a dark room not talking to anyone, going off for weeks in the family car. And this was reportedly bound up with his experience in the Zero Unit.

So when it comes to the question of “who broke the homeland?” it is clear it is the imperialist system, with its built-in drive for imperialist powers like the U.S. and its rivals to divide and redivide the world. Then, when things go sideways for them, they have the nerve to turn on the victims of their butchery and treachery, and question their humanity, and demand that they be cast out of society or driven into the shadows? Afghanistan is not unique in this. You can look at our series American Crime and find some similar stories all over the world, including from more than one of the 19 non-European countries from which Trump has now banned all immigration to the U.S.

Faced with a huge crisis of that very system, the fascist section of this imperialist ruling class—Trump, Miller, Vance and all the rest—are on a mission to save that system through a fascist form of rule. In their view, a fascist form of rule—one rooted in blatant, open and violent white supremacy, in male domination of women and repression of LGBT people, and in open hatred and massive scapegoating of  those they consider “foreigners”; one saturated in anti-scientific ignorance and theocratic fundamentalist Christianity; and one in which due process and civil liberties are essentially wiped out—is the only thing that can save the empire.

In the face of this, once again, we revcoms say:

In The Name Of Humanity, We Refuse To Accept A Fascist America!

This Whole System Is Rotten And Illegitimate!
We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System!